And how would you like to pay, sir – cash, credit card, or Bitcoin?

The government of Iceland does not have the necessary skills to manage its own currency. It should ditch the Icelandic krona and adopt Bitcoin, a nascent virtual currency that so far looks like the preserve of speculators, internet geeks, money launderers and illicit online gamblers. That was the incendiary view being championed by an angel investor called Sveinn Valfells last week, as investors, computer programmers and users of the online currency gathered at Canary Wharf to attend the Bitcoin London conference. Despite the unorthodoxy of Valfells' points, he was actually making his argument from a position of some kind of strength in that he is a) Icelandic, and b) comes from a family with a history of running unofficial currencies . "My grandfather co-founded a construction company in 1947 called Steypustodin – "the ready-mix factory" – and my father and his cousins we...